In this paper I test two models of strategic debt behavior. The general idea is that if a government anticipates the possibility of defeat in the next election it will try to use the debt strategically in order to influence the policy of its successor. Previous empirical studies have either rejected the strategic explanation of debt or have not been able to isolate this effect. I argue that the...

We postulate a new method of measuring debt which we call the debt burden (DB). We claim that DB reveals the true debt obligations of the fiscal authority by taking the intertemporal debt obligations of the government into account. It is more accurate and more transparent than the currently used methods of assessing debt. DB is calculated on a daily basis and it clearly identifies debt risks. I...

I develop a novel link between frictions in international financial markets and fiscal procyclicality. Complementing existing evidence, A decomposition of government expenditure into social spending and public good spending reveals that the cyclical correlation of social spending exhibits the biggest differences across countries. I build a small open economy model with income inequality, endoge...

Like a number of countries, Australia has undergone a substantial fiscal consolidation in recent years and a consequent reduction in government debt. On a cash basis, the Commonwealth government moved into surplus in the 1997/98 fiscal year, and has since run an average surplus of around 1% of GDP. Official projections over the next three years are for surpluses of similar magnitude to be maint...

We analyze optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy with distortionary labor income taxes, nominal rigidities and nominal debt of various maturities. Optimal policy prescribes the exclusive use of long term debt. Such debt mitigates the distortions associated with hedging fiscal shocks by allowing the government to allocate them efficiently across states and periods.

n 1958, Nobel Laureates Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller published their famous irrelevance theorems.1 One implication from these theorems is that ers and the U.S. government. Panel A of Figure 1 shows that if the corporate tax rate is 33.3%, the government gets one-third of the pie for an all-equity firm, and stockholders get the remaining two-thirds. But if the firm chooses to finance with...

Abstract Models of strategic debt predict that public increases with polarization, measured by the ideological distance between government and its likely successor. Conversely if voters are both short-termist also more to switch their vote for parties offering higher spending good provision when electorate is ideologically concentrated, then can fall dispersion preferences in electorate. Using ...

Our general pattern of deficits and debt has much in common with that of many other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, including the United States—that is, a very high ratio of debt to GDP coming out of the Second World War, followed by a rapid decline of the debt ratio as the military was demobilized, as economic growth took off, and as the effective intere...